Friday, October 24, 2008

Yesterday, I attended the Yahoo! Mobile Developer Awards Party held at Zouk and Velvet Underground. The event was held to announce the winners of the inaugural Yahoo! Mobile Developer Awards, a competition for students from leading Singapore tertiary institutes to build mobile widgets for global corporate brands, DBS Bank, Kellogg Asia, Malaysia Airlines, and travel portal UEEEU.com.

Back in September, a total of 24 teams from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP), Ngee Ann Polytechnic (NP), Singapore Polytechnic (SP) and Temasek Polytechnic (TP) started building their mobile widgets for the four companies mentioned earlier using Yahoo's latest mobile development platform called Yahoo! Blueprint, an easy to use, versatile and feature packed platform for developers to create and distribute mobile applications.

Yesterday at the event ceremony, the four winning widgets were announced. Here's a video of Yahoo's Gavin Hall (remember him?) telling me more about the awards and showing me two of the winning widgets.

The team that won the DBS Bank category is "Simple" from NTU. They developed a mobile widget to help customers of DBS conveniently locate branches and ATMs and access information on bank products and credit card privileges.

For the Malaysian Airlines category, the winning widget came from "We Mobile" from SP. Their widget encourages people to travel with Malaysian Airlines and incorporates interesting and useful features to assist users with their travel plans.

Lastly team "Chlorophyll Studios" from NYP won the UEEEU.com category. They created a widget to make customers' travel experience more convenient and enjoyable. The widget includes a language translator, a world time indicator, destination guides, hotel and vehicle search and reservation functions and travel planning.

The team that eventually won the "Best in Show" mobile widget last night was my personal favourite, "Simple" from NTU. I had a chance to talk to the team after they were presented with their award. Here's the video.

And here's the team posing with me for a photograph after the interview.

You can view more photos taken at the Yahoo! Mobile Awards Party including screenshots of the winning widgets here.

Wow Yahoo! is really doing some good work in the mobile internet sphere. OneSearch with voice (from your Communic posts) was super impressive, and now Blueprint is going to get many developers excited for sure.

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Creator of hit show Singapore Haunted. Spurs fan, experienced astronomer and occasional ITK. I.Z. Reloaded covers news, pop culture, blogs, websites, gadgets, the fascinating and the weird from a Singapore perspective. The blog is a runner up in both the 2006 Weblog Awards (Best Asia Blog) and the 2004 Asia Blog Awards (Best Singapore Blog). Contact him at izreloaded[at]gmail[dot]com.